Work Kills 20,000+ People Every Year in the UK

This is from Thompson's Solicitors' e-bulletin ...

The TUC has published a report showing that more than 20,000 people in the UK are killed by injuries and health conditions contracted at work every year.

“The Case for Health and Safety” smashes the myth that Britain is one of the safest places to work and shows that health and safety is as relevant an issue today for workers and employees as it has ever been.

An analysis by the TUC of the most conservative official safety figures shows that at least 20,000 people - the equivalent of the entire population of the Orkney Islands - die every year as a result of conditions such as occupational cancers and lung diseases, exposure to fumes and chemicals, and fatal work-related traffic accidents.

The report finds that thousands of workplace injuries go unreported. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) estimates that almost 250,000 workplace injuries happened last year but many were unreported or not reported correctly.

“The Case for Health and Safety” also reveals that 1.2 million working people in the UK believe they are suffering from a work-related illness. These include heart disease, stress, musculoskeletal disorders such as back, shoulder and neck pain, and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

And the report disputes claims, which have fed calls from business for health and safety deregulation, that the workplace is now much safer than it has ever been.

The TUC is calling on the Government to:

• ignore calls from the business lobby to reduce regulation and enforcement
• champion the issue and appoint a Government 'tsar' for health and safety
• use the UK network of 150,000 trained union health and safety reps to even greater effect
• support the work of the HSE and local authorities in protecting people at work.

You can download the report at: http://www.tuc.org.uk

No Gold Medal for Workers' Safety

Oddly, this appalling story of a worker's gruesome death on the mega-shopping centre site adjacent to the Olympic site in East London has barely registered in the media - only, apparently, on a trade website.

Are we only allowed to read good news about the 2012 Games?

Worker injured on Westfield Stratford City site dies

Employer 'deeply saddened' by death of Shaun Scurry one week after sustaining injuries on a scissor lift

The worker injured on the Westfield Stratford City construction site has died after a week in hospital.

Shaun Scurry sustained serious injuries on 9 December after using a scissor lift on the development near the 2012 Olympics site in east London.

A statement issued on behalf of Scurry’s employer, Firesafe Installations Ltd, said they were “deeply saddened” by his death and that their “thoughts and prayers are with his family”.

Ongoing investigations into the cause of death are being made by Firesafe Installations and the Health and Safety Executive.

Network Rail's Slapdash Safety Kills Rail Worker

Employers' disregard for workers' safety has claimed another victim.

Malcolm Slater was an overhead lines supervisor, an RMT member, and a long-serving railway worker just months away from his retirement.

On June 11, the metal ‘basket’ of a Unimog hoist fell away from its hydraulic arm during work on the overhead line at Margaretting, Essex, injuring three men. One of the three, Malcom, died of his injuries in hospital on Tuesday morning, July 1.

You may have noticed that my report on RMT's AGM referred to a debate on these "lethal Unimog machines". That debate unanimously demanded the withdrawal from use of all Unimog hydraulic hoists pending a proper investigation and appropriate action to remedy a serious design fault. As we debated, we were told that Malcolm's life was hanging by a thread, and it is devastating to hear now that he lost his battle to survive.

Workers and union reps had already raised concerns about the single weld which attached the basket to the arm, predicting that a serious accident could occur. Network Rail, however, were not bothered enough to take the machines out of service while the concerns were investigated. I wonder why - might have cost them money? The company's inaction has cost Malcolm Slater his life.

Greenwash

Big business hit the headlines last week with a CBI report on the threat of climate change. Another example of 'Greenwash'? An attempt by big business to appear concerned about the environment whilst simultaneously damaging it with their profit-driven activities? Certainly.

There's another agenda too. The CBI claims that "New taxes and regulations are needed to reward climate-friendly firms". In other words, they want us to pay them to slow down their killing of our planet. The bloody cheek of it.

CBI director Richard Lambert said that, "Carbon needs to be part of the DNA for businesses just like health and safety has become over the years." Given the statistics on workplace deaths, and the day-to-day experiences of workers endangered by their bosses, this suggests that the environment should be very very worried.

But it might yet be a useful comparison. If employers want to give environmental protection an equivalent status to health and safety, then they should recognise elected trade union environment reps - in fact, the government should make them do so, and give the reps strong legal rights. And just as workers have the right to refuse to work on the grounds of health and safety concerns, we should have the legal right to refuse to do work that we think is damaging the environment.

A Terrible Anniversary

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the King's Cross fire, when 31 people died because London Underground didn't have sufficient fire safety procedures.

As a result of the fire, the Fennell Report made over 100 recommendations, and LUL improved its fire safety through measures such as banning smoking, getting rid of wooden escalators, and providing radios for all staff. The Home Secretary made use of his powers under Section 12 of the 1971 Fire Precautions Act to introduce the Fire Precautions (Sub-Surface Railway Stations) Regulations 1989, which insist that there must be at least two staff on duty at all times, that they must be trained, rooms must be adequately compartmentalised, and there must be systems that detect, contain and suppress fire.

'Sub-surface railway stations' include not just London Underground, but the other metro systems in Tyne & Wear, Glasgow and Merseyside, plus several national rail stations, including Birmingham New Street. for those of us who work in them (I'm a Stations Supervisor on the largest London Underground station, but I'm required by my contract to say that my comments here are my own, not those of my employer), the 'Section 12 regulations' are etched into our whole approach to our job. They came too late to save the 31 casualties of 1987, but have certainly save countless lives since.

Which it is why it is so alarming that the government has been trying to whittle away at them over the last few years. RMT and FBU are giving optimistic signals about the latest talks, and there are some interesting reports on this webpage.

Refusing To Work On Safety Grounds

I've just written an article for Off The Rails about rail workers refusing to work on safety grounds. I doubt it will make the publication without some serious editing for length, but I rather like it in its full glory, so I thought I'd publish it here too. I'd welcome comments about how these strategies might be applied in other industries too. Here we go ...

Rail workers know that our employers are prepared to risk life and limb (ours, not theirs) to keep the trains running and the cash coming in. We can not trust them to protect us at work - we have to rely on ourselves.

In the first century of the railway industry, unsafe working conditions killed and injured workers at an alarming rate, and campaigns for higher safety standards drove the growth of railway trade unionism. Today, in the century of Tebay and Hatfield, this fight is as crucial as ever.

In the 1980s and 90s, Tory governments took away many of our trade union rights, and ten years of New Labour has kept virtually all the anti-union laws in place. Ironically though, over the same period our legal safety rights have increased. Although the political right wing would probably see this as a shift from collective to individual rights, and although safety law does refer to individual workers, we can still use it for collective struggles, together refusing to work on safety grounds. And unlike official industrial action, these struggles can be immediate and free from constraints of notice periods and exhaustive balloting procedures.

What Does The Law Say?

The Management Of Health And Safety At Work Regulations 1992 state that employees have the right to stop work and proceed to a place of safety "if exposed to serious, imminent and unavoidable danger".

The Trade Union Reform And Employment Rights Act 1993, confirmed by the Employment Rights Act 1996, gave protection to union health and safety representatives, and ordinary workers, to raise safety concerns and act on them. In particular, it made it illegal for employers to victimise workers who:

• leave, propose to leave, or refuse to return to a workplace (or part of it) in the event of danger they believe to be serious and imminent and could not reasonably be expected to avert;
  
• take appropriate steps to protect themselves and others when facing serious and imminent danger.

Case law has established that this covers danger to the public as well as to staff.

Using The Law

These legal rights were first used when Select Timber of Basingstoke sacked a building worker. He had called in Health & Safety Executive (HSE) inspectors when his employer made him work with lindane-treated wood which made him ill. He won his 'unfair dismissal' claim.

Then in January 1996, ASLEF members refused to drive trains on the North Kent lines after tests showed that 10% had cracked couplings. Management decided to keep the trains running but with the connecting doors locked to prevent passengers getting to the couplings. Management's profits-first-safety-second plan failed to consider what would happen if the couplings completely fractured at high speed, or how passengers could be evacuated through locked doors in the event of a fire or crash! So drivers refused to drive, the HSE backed them, and management were forced to withdraw the whole fleet for inspection and repair. It was a significant victory for workers' solidarity; we will never know how many lives it saved.

Connex won the South Eastern franchise under privatisation, then lost it a few years later when even the government could no longer ignore how crap it was. During its tenure, Connex ran an appalling safety regime, with long driving hours, obstruction and victimisation of safety reps, and no action on assaults, cab heat, flooding in sidings and other issues. But workers still won a few victories, by refusing to use unsafe walkways, take meal breaks in smoke-filled mess rooms, use 465/6 cabs when unbearably hot, or take trains into passenger service with safety faults.

In 2002, when the Fire Brigades Union took strike action for a decent pay rise, London Underground drivers refused to drive because they knew the potentially-fatal consequences of lack of fire cover in the event of a fire or crash. It was also an act of solidarity with the striking firefighters. On the second day of the drivers' refusal, LUL sent them home without pay (an act of solidarity with the Fire Brigade employers!). Months later, the company settled the drivers' Employment Tribunal claim and fully refunded their docked pay.

2005 saw a case which highlighted the injustice of the anti-union laws. Midland Mainline introduced multiple-unit trains with no connecting door. Guards insisted that there should be a guard in each part of the train and refused to work the trains as the only guard unless the inaccessible part of the train was locked out of use. RMT then balloted the 100 guards for industrial action. 90% voted Yes, only to see their employer get a court to declare the ballot illegal on the grounds that it was 'tainted' by the refusal to work. It was a scandalous class-biased ruling, which unfortunately seems to have made RMT more reluctant to take action on safety issues - the 2007 London Underground Rule Book dispute being a case in point. It is also a lesson to the unions that it may be better not to mix refusal to work with industrial action ballots. Organise the refusal properly and there should be no need to ballot too. In any case, we lose money when we strike, but not when we assert our legal rights to refuse to work on safety grounds.

Also in 2005, ASLEF produced advice to members on refusal to drive if the cab is too hot. Typically for official union notices, it is cautiously-worded: "Members are advised that ASLEF believes that circumstances may arise in which our members and the public are in 'serious and imminent danger', due to the possible physical symptoms arising from heat-related illnesses while driving trains in hot weather." Off The Rails can be more direct. If the cab's too hot, refuse to get in it. If any working practice is unsafe, refuse to do it.

Refusing Unsafe Work

There are countless other examples more small-scale and local than these. In many cases, unsafe working conditions have continued for days, weeks, even months, while management do nothing - then workers refuse to work and the problem quickly gets fixed. Employers can have all the paperwork and procedures that they like, but it is often only workers' action that enforces them. In one case, staff worked in a ticket office whose air conditioning unit failed - management did nothing for weeks, then the ticket sellers closed their windows and an hour later management delivered a fan! In another, the employer failed for several weeks to investigate the suspected presence of asbestos in a lift machine room, until station staff found out about it, took the lift out of service and closed the station. In yet another, management let a P-Way cabin descend into an appalling unhygienic state, but when workers refused to book on there, quickly got it cleaned up.

Here's what to do. Make sure you know your employer's procedure for refusal to work on grounds of health and safety concerns. Legally, every employer must have one, and it should be available to all workers. You could make it even more available by dishing out copies in the workplace, and/or producing a clear, concise summary of it and giving everyone a copy.

When you are faced with a dangerous situation, follow the procedure. Alert your union health and safety rep; tell all your workmates and encourage them to take the same action as you. You will probably have to write a statement as to why you are refusing to work. Management may well try to intimidate you and isolate you. Stick to your guns and remember that strength is in numbers. Keep together, and try to spread your action as quickly as possible. Go to the rest of the union, and to other unions, for support. When and where appropriate, explain to the public that you acted in their interest against a company that risked their safety.

When workers take action like this, it asserts our right to have control over our workplace and our safety. It is usually initiated by rank-and-file union members rather than head offices, and should therefore be controlled by the rank and file. However, stronger leadership and encouragement from head offices could give rail workers more confidence to use this method of struggle to improve our safety and conditions at work.